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High and low-tech lynchings

Last week Rand Paul was a victim of a “high-tech lynching,” writes Ken Blackwell, “of a piece with what the liberal media put Clarence Thomas through in 1991.”

Because Justice Thomas is black, he is vilified by leftists who believe that all minorities must support their left wing causes. Dr. Paul is an opthalmologist. He is expert on astigmatism. What we can clearly see is the moral astigmatism of the left. For example: As a state senator in Illinois, Barack Obama voted not once but repeatedly against giving civil rights protection to newborns who survived abortion attempts….

When a gang of married white Republican men claimed to have slept with South Carolina gubernatorial candidate Nikki Haley, Red State’s Erik Erikson called up visions of night riders:

Pulling the noose ever tighter, stringing everyone along, the good old boys in South Carolina don’t want the uppity Indian lady becoming Governor because she’s made life too miserable for them.

So we’re having a high tech lynching with Will Folk’s pulling the noose. The media is playing along because they love the spectacle of lynchings, even when they say they don’t. It’s payback time and a ratings bonanza all rolled into one.

Most of the lynchings we’re hearing about this week are decidedly lower tech. A handful of Israeli commandos innocently dropped onto the deck of a ship where they were beset by a howling mob of faux humanitarians; the next day in New York, according to a much-linked web posting, a “political Lynch Mob Let Loose on Israel ‘without a peep’ from The House of Hussein.” Charles Krauthammer jumped on the bandwagon too.

Turning the opposition’s tropes back on itself can be a devastating rhetorical device, but sometimes it just makes you look stupid. A conservative black justice who made his bones by rejecting affirmative action casts himself as a helpless victim of race prejudice and demands a reparative lifetime appointment on the Supreme Court; a dark-skinned woman of the Tea Party is accused of bad behavior by her own friends, colleagues, and fellow-travelers (and what a chivalrous bunch they are) and she becomes Emmet Till. Pressuring Rand Paul to acknowledge his disapprobation of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, says his African American defender, is tantamount to stringing him up, which is why real libertarians, if I follow his reasoning, should be opposed to a woman’s right to choose. A nuclear-armed nation state enforces a blockade with brute power and calls itself a victim when the world cries foul. “Likening a UN declaration decrying an attack on civilians to a lynching requires an absurdly reductive view,” as Seth Freed Wessler wrote in Colorlines.

Can we at least agree that the word “lynch” is being devalued beyond all reckoning? For the immediate future, let’s reserve it for stories like this one.